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A healthy natural environment is one of the world’s most important tourism attractions, and that visiting nature serves to heighten awareness of its intrinsic value for us all, a new manual launched by the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) presents guidelines on sustainable tourism and management.

Geared towards being both practical and accessible, Tourism Supporting Biodiversity: A Manual on applying the CBD Guidelines on Biodiversity and Tourism Development, highlights the important role tourism plays for biodiversity and aims to improve knowledge and materials to better integrate biodiversity into sustainable tourism development.

“The manual is a reference tool for planners, developers, managers and decision makers involved with tourism development and resource management in areas of sensitive biodiversity,” said Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, CBD Executive Secretary. “The purpose is to help them to mainstream biodiversity concerns and ecosystem services within sustainable tourism development.”

With its emphasis on management and governance, the manual, prepared as a result of experiences compiled by the Secretariat and decisions taken by countries at the eleventh and twelfth meetings of the Conference of the Parties to the CBD, reflects a wider perspective on approaches and experiences in sustainable tourism development and management. It serves to complement the more technical User’s Manual on the CBD Guidelines on Biodiversity and Tourism Development, published in 2007.

The manual is the result of a collaboration between the CBD Secretariat, the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and some 140 experts from around the world to identify current trends and upcoming issues and opportunities on the links between sustainable tourism development and the CBD agenda, and is meant to be used as a transformative tool for sustainable consumption.

More and more travelers are heading for cities that promote environmentally friendly transport, renewable energy, and restaurants that serve food from sustainable sources. We take you to Hamburg, Neumarkt, and Freiburg. DW Read more.

In the last decade, the tourism industry has been overtaken by a new kind of tourist: one who avoids popular sites and abandons their maps. Welcome to the age of the “post-tourist”. Siobhan Lyons Read more.

You don’t need super powers to add a dose of sustainability to your holiday. Check out this sustainable tourism guide and infographic. These travel tips can easily be incorporated in your trip. Peter Berg Schmidt. Read more.

November 12, 2015 – Intelligent Mobility is an integrated approach towards achieving the global transportation industry’s three key goals of safer, cleaner and leaner mobility through creating vehicles that promote an eco-driving experience, are insulated from crash fatalities and are tuned to combat congestion. Read more.

September 29, 2015 – If a flight attendant told me that I couldn’t bring my roller bag onto the plane, I might throw a fit. But when the same idea comes from Teague—the preeminent air travel design studio that’s designed the interiors of Boeing planes since 1946—I’ll hear them out. Mark Wilson Read more.

Indonesian tourists pose in front of members of the Stone Age Dani tribe in West Papua, New Guinea. The tribe maintains many of its costumes and traditions — and charges visitors for the honor of observing them. Credit Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

In a globalized age — when a McAloo Tikki is just as Indian as the Taj Mahal — has the very word lost its meaning?

I once spent an unforgettable day in the traveler’s treasure-house that is Sana’a, capital of Yemen. Stained-glass windows glittered from thickets of high tower-houses as night began to fall, and khat-chewing men with daggers at their sides haggled furiously in the Salt Market. Clay walls surrounded one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements on the planet, where groups of turbaned shopkeepers headed toward 1,400-year-old mosques as the call to prayer echoed through the dusk. It wasn’t hard to feel, amid the dusty lanes of a large section of town that’s now a Unesco World Heritage Site, that nothing had changed since the Prophet’s time; here, I decided, was the Old World, all slowness and prayer and tribal custom, in stark opposition to the fast-forward, hyperconnected, young society I know in California. By Pico Iyer. Read more.

Comments Off on Scottish EU-funded project launched that will help remote and rural airports to reduce their carbon footprint

November 05 2015 – A three-year, €2.4 million ($2.6m) project has been launched in Scotland to heighten awareness of the importance to rural and remote communities of local air services and to use innovative technologies to make them as cost effective and environmentally friendly as possible. Green Air Communications Read more.

Comments Off on Berlin-based refugees create map of resources for newcomers

November 01 2015 – A group of refugees in Berlin have banded together to map key resources across the city, including counseling, healthcare, German language lessons, accommodation, legal assistance, police and public transport facilities. Jeremy Smith Read more.